Looks like we've always been wrong about what inspired the Daleks

For decades, the story of how BBC designer Raymond Cusick came up with one of Doctor Who’s most resilient enemies, the Daleks, has been that he’d been inspired by a pepper pot he pushed around a table. No longer.

Apparently Cusick—who died last week at the age of 84—first dreamed of the Daleks after looking at a school rooftop at the High School for Girls in Gloucester ... where the chimney stack sits.

He is believed to have seen said chimney during a visit to Gloucester back in the early 1960s.

A spokeswoman for that school has said that whoever was working on Who saw it on top of the school.

Story goes that Raymond Cusick had first planned to build robots to chase our beloved Mad Man in the Big Blue Box, the Doctor, but to save money (that sounds soooo familiar), it was decided to make a monster operated from inside by an actor—as are all Daleks even today.

Are you guys surprised by this new "origin" story for the Daleks? We still think it doesn't change the fact that Cusick was still inspired by a pepper pot to come up with our beloved space, um, pepper pots. He just also had that chimney stack in mind, too.